Portraits
2025
Portraits (2025) is a series of three live-streamed performance-to-videos. Professional content creators from Ukraine, Egypt, and Nepal sit still in their home locations, in a self-selected pose and composition. Their almost-motionless performances are broadcast live to a screen in the gallery. A contextual text with the screen informs the audience that the portrait is transpiring live. Between broadcasts, the screen displays a video of the empty set of the next performance.
Portraits at Ormston House (2025). Video: Jed Neizgoda
Guinan selected the performers from online freelance marketplaces and worked with them remotely over several months to direct a personalised portrait. The durational performances included several comfort breaks for the performers, who received training in performance art, meditation, and physical therapy techniques for several months prior.
Portraits at Ormston House (2025). Video: Jed Neizgoda
Portraits at Ormston House (2025). Video: Jed Neizgoda
Custom infrastructures (back-up generators, WiFi hotspots, data server rental, lighting etc.) were set up in each location to ensure the seamless streaming of HD video over several hours. Photographs taken by the performers of the technical set ups in their home location are exhibited with the artwork.
This work is a further development of Guinan’s earlier iteration Portraits (2019) and features some of the original performers, with new technical specifications and stage directions.
Exhibitions
‘Distance is a Measure of Closeness’, Ormston House, Limerick (2025)
‘Our Celestial Sphere’, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2019)
Production Credits
Artistic-Direction
Kerry Guinan
Technical Direction
Kerry Guinan
Performers
Nirvaya Subedi, Oleg Repetskiy, and Maimana Ghonim.
Portraits was created with the support of The Arts Council of Ireland, Fingal Arts Office, The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, Sweden, and Limerick City and County Council.